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Part of the sad but enduring "History of Failed ODF Interoperability Attempts".  This particular message is dated November 20th, 2006. 

The OpenDocument Foundation was notified a week earlier that the "benefactor" ODF Community group Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to put together in Massachusetts had failed.  This was the group Louis formed around the da Vinci plugin and our InfoSet APi. 

Florian has been hired by Novell, and his first day on the job he finds out about the IBM - Novell deal with Microsoft.  Now he has write the MOOXML plugin for OpenOffice using the MS-CleverAge Translator Project work.  So he writes this message to the ODF TC [office] list. 

The interoperability enhancements Florian suggests are based on the <interoperability eXtensions> submitted in August to the ODF Metadata SC for consideration.

The first element in this list tha tFlorian chose to tackle related to "Lists".  He called it the "LIst Override Proposal".  This became the now infamous "List Enhancement Proposal War" that resulted in Sun having OASIS boot out the Foundation.

Such is life in big vendor ODF'dom

~ge~

This is the fifth of the six major iX - interoperability enhancement proposals submitted to the OASIS ODF TC - SC between July 2006 and February of 2007. This particular iX proposal lead to the "List Enhancement Proposal" donnybrook that consumed the OASIS ODF TC for the next six months, ending with the OpenDocument Foundation being booted out of OASIS in May of 2007. The six iX proposals were all different approaches to the same basic problem: ODF was not desinged to be interoperable with MSOffice documents, applications or bound processes. The proposals come out of the OpenDocument' Foundation's efforts to save ODF in Massachusetts. ODF iX repressents a subset of ODF designed to grealty improve compatibility with MS binary and XML formats. With the ODF iX subset, the da Vinci plug-in would be able to convert the billions of MSOffice binary and xml documents with a very high level of fidelity, and do so within the bounds of "round trip" business processes. The most basic iX approach was to add five generic elements to the existing ODF specification. The five generic elements would cover lists, tables, fields, sections, and page dynamics (breaks). It is a well known fact that these five areas of incompatibility between OpenOffice ODF and MSOffice binaries represent 95% of all conversion fidelity problems. MSOffice has one way of implementing lists, and, OpenOffice has another. These application specific implementation models are irreconcilably different. It's also true that the applicaiton specific implementation models are directly reflected in each file format. So applications implementing ODF must also implement the OpenOffice model for lists, fields, tables, sections and page dynamics-page positioning if they are to have any meaningful measure of exchange fidelity. Perhaps the best of the iX approaches was that based on the innovative use of metadata to describe presentation-layout attributes.

WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo.

Contact: Gerd Schürmann Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS Tel +49 (0)30 3463 7213 gerd.schuermann@fokus.fraunhofer.de Berlin

At a recent meeting in Berlin, The DIN Fraunhoffer Institute pushed forward with the EU project to harmonize ODF and OOXML. Microsoft and Novell attended the harmonization effort. Sun and IBM did not. This in spite of invitations and pleas to cooperate coming into Sun and IBM from government officials across the European continent. We've long insisted that inside the OASIS ODF Technical Committee walls there have been years of discussions concerning ODF compatibility with the billions of MS binary documents, and ODF interoperability with MSOffice. Sun in particular has been very clear that they will not compromise OpenOffice application innovations to improve interoperability with MSOffice and MSOffice documents. The infamous List Enhancement Proposal donnybrook that dominated OASIS ODF discussions from November 20th, 2006, to the final vote in April of 2007, actually begins with a statement from Sun arguing that application innovation is far more important than market demands for interoperability. The discussions starts here: Suggested ODF1.2 items The first of many responses declaring Sun's position that innovation trumps interop, and that if anyone needs to change their application it should be Microsoft: see here DIN will submit a "harmonization" report with recommendations to ISO JTC1. I wonder if IBM and Sun will continue to insist on government mandated "rip out and replace" solutions based on their ODF applications when ISO and the EU have set a course for "harmonization"?